Yes incentives and it’s zero-sum – shifting away from financial incentives is the only way to save the environment

Timothee Parrique, “A response to Alessio Terzi: Degrowth for good. Dismantling capitalism to save humanity from climate catastrophe”, WordPress, 17 April 2023, ,

It is impossible to redistribute wealth without growing

“In a world in which total resources are fixed, or even shrinking, one person’s gain is inevitably another’s loss, bringing taxation dangerously close to a zero-sum game. Personal success comes to be associated with squeezing resources out of someone else rather than, perhaps, innovating and creating new value for society” (p. 70).

First remark: ecosystems being finite, their sharing is unavoidably a zero-sum game. Take the splitting of the global carbon budget. In order to have a 50% chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, we – as humans – must not emit more than 380 GtCO2. If a country emits more than their fair share, it means another country won’t be able to use theirs (same dilemma for water, rare metals, minerals, etc.). We’re back at the scale problem. Rich economies are consuming resources at a pace that jeopardises the functioning of Earth systems. While some of them have managed to reduce a few selected environmental indicators, none has succeeded to bring their total ecological footprint under safe planetary boundaries – hence the need to hit the emergency brake.

There is another problem with that criticism. It assumes that people are only motivated by getting richer and so that an economy that doesn’t reward individuals with money would be socially stagnant. Again, this is not a criticism of degrowth but of socialism. Personally, I don’t buy it. If this money-makes-the-world-go-round mentality was unavoidably true, Doctors Without Borders, Extinction Rebellion, or any other not-for-profit initiatives would have never existed. The reality is that people have various definitions of success, many of them going beyond making money. Scientists want to discover new things they’re curious about, traders want to sell to make a profit, environmental activists want to block coal mines to save the planet, etc.

The problem today is that financial incentives (and monetary wealth) are given too much importance compared to cultural/moral incentives (and social and ecological wealth). This moneymaking craze is the result of a specific system where everything can be bought and sold and where power derives from how much money you have. A society where most means of livelihoods are commoditised makes people dependant on their individual purchasing power, which pre-determines what they can and cannot do. This is why we have so many business schools and so little poetry schools. In an alternative economic system where all people have a secure access to essential goods and services (yes, this means price controls), where jobs are guaranteed, and where inequalities are kept in check, the balance of incentives would change, and so would behaviour.[1]